Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. I think it all went south when I left the company. I'm just kidding. No, and again, I have to call out the fact that I haven't been close to Lyft, and their business and strategy for many years at this point. So, take this with a grain of salt. This is my very naive perspective, but I think to me, perhaps the biggest blow to Lyft's business was somewhat inherent, like the vision. Lyft's vision was always anchored around transportation, people of transportation. The founders were deeply passionate about moving people, they were passionate about transforming the way people move around in a city. They wanted to just change how cities are designed, how roads are designed. And so, that meant investing in dynamic shuttles and things like that, and there's a lot of experimentation that went to that. But it also meant that Lyft never invested in things like food delivery, or goods and parcels, and things like that. And I think that crushed them during COVID essentially. I think Uber had, I think at some point their slogan was moving in bits and atoms, or something like that. But I think it implies this notion of being a logistics platform for assets in the world, for transporting people, for transporting things, for transporting ... And I think they built, they invested lot in trucks and food delivery, and all those really exotic things that Lyft had never any intention to invest in. Not even because of the lack of resources, but because this was in part a distraction from our vision. We wanted to change how people move around in cities, we wanted to reinvent public transportation, we did not want to be a DoorDash competitor and help you get in donuts during COVID. And a huge part of it also was leaning heavily in shared rides. And so, this was like, again, how do you reinvent public transportation? It's like every car is a dynamic bus, and now there's a bus line. The bus line is always running, it's always by your house. So, a lot of our investment I think in thinking went in that direction, and the last thing that people wanted with COVID was to be in a car with five strangers, but what people wanted is food delivered to their house. And so, I know that the business had a huge blow during COVID, whereas I think Uber was able to rebound much more quickly because of how diversified the business was. And so, it's funny now because I think Lyft actually killed shared rides, which was just so core to their identity. They were the first ones to launch this. And so yeah, the new COO I think killed the shared rides, which actually I'm really sad about. But yeah, so I think it indicates a very different vision now, a very different direction for the business. And yeah, that's my take, I guess. Interesting. So, essentially COVID really effed them because their strategy was always about transportation, and when nobody needs a ride and people want food, strategically Uber made a really good move expanding into food delivery, which I think was a bigger business than rides for a long time. I don't know where it's at today for Uber, and Lyft didn't have that, and it's hard to recover from a time like that. So, it sounds like it's a combination of strategy was pointing Lyft in a certain direction, and circumstances in the world just made it really hard- And losing me me.…

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